The present invention relates to a method and a system unit of mail wrapping, more specifically, to a method of mail wrapping and a mail wrapping system unit used to execute the method for grouping a multiplicity of address-indicated postal items, as issued and collected from a plurality of companies of various industries, at a facility in accordance with a coincidence of the destination addresses respectively expressed on said address-indicated postal items. And the present invention is designed to be used when the companies of the various industries have the address-indicated postal items (including enveloped letters and postcards intended to be delivered via a specified delivery agency and addressee-specific correspondences on which the addresses and names of the addressees are indicated in advance such as bills and account statements) respectively and at the same time the companies want to send the address-indicated postal items all together to the same addressees of households or enterprises at one time.
When a key telephone company, cellular phone companies, public corporations such as electric power companies or gas supply companies (including waterworks bureau), banking organs, credit card companies, mail-order houses that operate product sales by a direct mail method (referred to as "direct mail companies" hereinafter), government offices, and any companies of various types of industries (government offices are referred to as a part of companies in various types of industries, hereinafter) send any type of correspondence to their respective customers (including enterprises), they usually deposit such postal items in post offices individually and independently.
FIG. 6 shows the types of postal items delivered to some household. As shown in the figure, it clearly indicates that a lot of postal items are delivered to the household scattered at random over the weekdays in a given month. It is also obvious that there are many postal items, each of which carries a specific document (an exceptional correspondence on which the address and name are expressed in advance), that are issued periodically and delivered such as bills and account statements prepared by the respective companies. (For example, the key telephone company issues telephone bills once every five days, though depending on the customers' districts, and the credit card company issues account statements on specified days of the month.)
As in the typical case of the key telephone company which sends bills to the respective users of its telephone services, most companies which send postal items to their customers utilize postage discount systems available to them such as basic discount rates or special discount rates for special local mail services in order to minimize their mailing costs. The average annual postage cost of these companies in connection with postal items sent to their respective customers stands at several billion yen and in an extreme case, a company of some industry spends more than 100 billion yen a year on postage.
The circumstances do not in any way inconvenience the customers, since no customers are obliged to pay for the postage of such postal items. However, if the postal charges shouldered by such companies are increased sharply due to a revision of the Postal Law, the companies will have no alternative but to pass along the increased cost to their service charges. As a solution to this problem in the future, some companies are studying plans to send a large percentage of their postal items through private carriers which recently feature much lower service charges than the postal services.
In the conventional delivery method of postal items, a lot of postal items of similar types, such as bills and account statements, are delivered separately at random on different days of any given month, which is bothersome to some customers who believe it convenient to receive bills and account statements on a single fixed day every month and settle each payment at a bank or the like at one time.
Also post offices are under the pressure of dramatically increased indoor handling work resulting from a huge volume of mail deposited each time by different companies in different industries. With the yearly increasing number of postal items handled at post offices, it is likely that efficient transportation and delivery of these postal items will be seriously affected in the future.
Such problems as those mentioned above may be solved easily if the different companies of different industries cooperate in collecting, whether periodically or not, the address-indicated postal items issued by the companies all together at one time, sorting such postal items by forming groups of postal items having the same destination addresses, and further depositing the postal items in a specified delivery agency such as a post office or a private carrier. However, no such intensive operation systems have been initiated as yet.